What Had I Hoped to Teach This Just-Past Semester?

What Kinds of Questions Did I Hope That People Would Be Able to Answer After Taking Econ 135: The History of Economic Growth?...

What Kinds of Questions Did I Hope That People Would Be Able to Answer After Taking Econ 135: The History of Economic Growth?…

On Thoukydides of the Athenai & the Treasure of Time: How a disgraced Athenian general’s insights still shape our understanding of the uses of history, the Greek rhetorical trope of looking not just in front & in back, left & right, up & down, but also looking forwards and backwards in time, the role of narrative in cognition, & thus how and why history helps us reason better about not just the history of economic growth but the present & future of the economy & its growth processes…

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Thrown out of his home city by the twists and turns of politics politics, hanging out in exile in weird barbarian places as an ex-aristocrat, too close to various Spartan sources and liking too many Spartans too much and so making nearly everyone in his home city uncomfortable—Thoukydides of the Athenai was not a guy doing conspicuously well as an aristocrat in the years around -400. And yet the guy was, or at least was presenting himself as, the most self-confident individual alive. He was, he wrote, writing his History of the Peloponnesian War for a discerning audience, for people who were:

such as shall desire to gain a true picture, both of the past and of what is likely hereafter, which in accordance with the course of human nature, to prove either just the same or very like it…

Thoukydides claims that his book will help the readers whom he wants—those who do not want to be diverted and amused momentarily by fine-sounding words, but actually have deeper and more important goals—to gain a true picture of the human past and the human future. They will gain the power to not just look around and see the world as it appears around them in order to gain situational awareness with respect to the moment, but the power to look backwards and forwards in time. That, Josiah Ober notes, is precisely what, in the Iliad, Akhilleus condemns Agamemnon for definitely not doing. (Yes, it is very rich irony here that Akhilleus condemns Agamemnon for this particular flaw in his mental makeup.)

Thus Thoukydides claims that his book was “not written for a prize composition to please the ear for a moment”, but—in the single most arrogant statement I have ever read from any author, anywhere, anywhen—rather is:

a treasure for all time…

Thoukydides was right.

He was thus right about at least one of the major purposes of history. Our students are human beings who will spend their lives engaging in human affairs. We should try to teach them how to do this well. And so order to gain insight into “human affairs” in general we are led to study history.

I think, at bottom, that it is a question of cognitive load. We reason narratively and analogically: the world is made up of stories with beginnings, middles, and ends that follow; and this story is like that one. This is who we are, and how we think. Thus in this I agree with Dan Davies: our cognition is such that we find it much, much much easier to either dismiss or utilize an analogy than to model a situation from scratch. Our history is great at providing us with a very large library of potential analogies and analogues. We can then run through them quickly, and wind up with insights and ideas and questions to pursue.

That this is an important use of history has, indeed, been known for at least two and a half thousand years. Ober stresses that by the year -700 and the compilation of the Iliad this verbal expression—to look backwards and forwards in time—had become a standard trope for thinking clearly and rationally about a situation. It is, he notes, found five times in Homer’s poem as a quality of thought possessed by:

older men… having to assess a high-stakes situation… and offering advice about the best, although not the most obvious or most popular, course of action… [that] would, in each case, avoid catastrophic outcomes—were it followed…. [But the] “speech was not to their mind”… and disaster follows…

The ultimate lesson the Iliad teaches here is thus rather grim: to look backwards and forwards in time is a very valuable mental quality to possess, but it is not highly valued.

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A final exam is a time to see if students can actually synthesize. So on our final we made them write an essay—a single, three-hour essay.

Here are what were my first drafts of the four essay questions from which we made the students choose one to answer:

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Economic Instability & Political Economy: Economic instability is the result of shocks to the economy—famines, plagues, wars elsewhere, collapses in business confidence, and other factors—that are either amplified or reduced by governments’ destructive or constructive attempts to handle them. Political economy is how people with economic interests pressure or control the government in how it deals out the cards people use to play their respective hands as they live their economic life. What, throughout history, are the major ways in which episodes of economic instability typically have had effects on political economy? What, throughout history, are the major ways in which events in political economy typically have had effects on economic instability?

Inequality—International & Intranational: How, today, are people’s lives likely to be different if they are (a) born in a rich family or (b) born in a poor family in a (1) rich country oe a (2) poor country? Analyze these four cases—that is, (a1), (a2), (a3), and (a4). Which of the differences is most striking and most important? And—here is the history part—how are the answers to these questions if we look at not today but at the year 1500, at the end of the Agrarian Age?

What Does Humanity’s Economic Transformation Mean?: Choose a country. How are people’s economic lives in it today different from how they were back in the year 1000 or so? And how much does this matter for them, and for their pursuit of their happiness?

Modern Economic Growth & Its Sources: Back in 1776 Scottish moral philosopher and economist Adam Smith, writing in his Wealth of Nations, was typical of economists then in that he thought that we were only likely to see more than subsistence-level working-class wages in countries that had, relatively recently, undergone substantial positive changes in their laws and institutions. He pointed to: “China [which] has been long one of the richest, that is, one of the most fertile, best cultivated, most industrious, and most populous countries in the world.… [and has] acquired that full complement of riches which the nature of its laws and institutions permits it to acquire… [with] low wages of labour, and…. A labourer… if by digging the ground a whole day… can get what will purchase a small quantity of rice in the evening, he is contented. The condition of artificers is, if possible, still worse…” We, by contrast, do not believe that we need constant and substantial improvement in our laws and institutions in order to keep the working-class bulk of the human population away from low subsistence-level wages. Why do we no longer fear this?

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References:

• Davies, Dan. 2023. “The Valve Amplifier of History”. Back of Mind, May 3. <https://backofmind.substack.com/p/the-valve-amplifier-of-history>.

• Homeros. 1974 [-700]. The Iliad. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday. <https://archive.org/download/hmrio/The%20Iliad%20by%20Homer%20-%20translated%20by%20Robert%20Fitzgerald.pdf>.

• Ober, Josiah. 2022. The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason. Oakland: University of California Press. <https://archive.org/details/greeksandrational>.

• Smith, Adam. 1776. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. London: W. Strahan & T. Cadell. <https://archive.org/details/WealthOfNationsAdamSmith>.

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